Techonomics

Here you'll find core information about the tech industry and the economic principles behind it cvahanian May 4

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http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/why-churn-is-critical-in-saas/

Summary: Illustrates graphically why churn is a huge problem a SaaS company gets larger. It also looks at a very surprising factor that can massively accelerate SaaS growth: negative churn . (This article is applicable to any recurring revenue business, not just SaaS.)

Why Churn is so critical to success in SaaS

http://www.paristechreview.com/2011/03/15/innovation-de-rupture-comment-rechercher-inimaginable/

Au milieu des années 80, Garry Hamel, un des grands gourous californiens du management, avait jeté un pavé dans la mare: l’ère du progrès conventionnel et linéaire était révolue. Le changement n’était plus ni additif, ni linéaire. Il était discontinu.

Innovation de rupture: comment rechercher l’inimaginable | ParisTech Review

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460.html

This week, Hewlett-Packard (where I am on the board) announced that it is exploring jettisoning its struggling PC business in favor of investing more heavily in software, where it sees better potential for growth. Meanwhile, Google plans to buy up the cellphone handset maker Motorola Mobility. Both moves surprised the tech world.

Marc Andreessen on Why Software Is Eating the World - WSJ.com

Economic principles

App vs Browser

"Let the products sell themselves... fuck advertising, commercial psychology ... psychological methods to sell should be destroyed." - The Minutemen, Shit From An Old Notebook We have enough data now to realize that display advertising on the Internet doesn't work. Some suggest click through rates are as low .09%, a shockingly low number .

The Golden Age of Internet Marketing?

http://blog.aweissman.com/2011/11/golden-age-of-internet-marketing.html

Disruptive Innovation: Pushing the Limits of the Imaginable | ParisTech Review

The 1980s progressed and the legendary California management guru, Garry Hamel, lobbed stones on the surface of the linear model for innovation that would send ripples outward and demand new patterns neither incremental nor linear.

http://www.paristechreview.com/2011/03/15/disruptive-innovation-pushing-limits-imaginable/

http://www.mckinsey.com/Insights/MGI/Research/Technology_and_Innovation/Internet_matters

The Internet is a vast mosaic of economic activity, ranging from millions of daily online transactions and communications to smartphone downloads of TV shows. But little is known about how the web in its entirety contributes to global growth, productivity, and employment. First quantitative assessment of the Internet's economic impact presented at e-G8 Forum

Company - Report - Internet matters: The net’s sweeping impact on growth, jobs, and prosperity - May 2011

Inside the Recommendation Engines of StumbleUpon, YouTube, Pandora and Hotpot | Liz Gannes | NetworkEffect | AllThingsD

PayPal made a big splash yesterday, saying that it now has commitments from 16 major retailers to roll out PayPal at the register.

Platforms succeed when they are 1) financially sustainable, and 2) have a sufficient number of developers that are financially sustainable. Fostering a successful developer community means convincing developers (and, possibly, investors in developers) that the platform is a worthwhile investment of time and money.

The importance of predictability for platform developers

A VC: Free Software, Paid Support

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/02/free-software-paid-support.html

There is a thread on programmers.stackexchange.com that asks the question " Why do programmers write applications and then make them free?

The Unwelcome Return of Platform Dependencies

http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/26/platform-dependencies/

Editor’s Note : The following guest post is written by a Silicon Valley CEO.

One of the amazing things about the internet economy is how different the list of top internet properties today looks from the list ten years ago . It wasn’t as if those former top companies were complacent – most of them acquired and built products like crazy to avoid being displaced. The reason big new things sneak by incumbents is that the next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a “toy.”

The next big thing will start out looking like a toy cdixon.org

Business models

The Web has hit a point where tracking pageviews is useless for startups. There was a time when all you needed to succeed on the Internet were lots and lots of eyeballs, and the best way of measuring those eyeballs was by tracking pageviews (measuring exactly which pages on a website are viewed by individual visitors). The dot-com crash showed us that the eyeball-based business model was a failure. Since then, startups have moved toward direct monetization strategies such as subscriptions and virtual goods - and these businesses using these strategies require very different metrics than an advertising-based business would. Make no mistake, pageviews were valuable metric once, but their time has passed. Guest author Tim Trefren is one of the founders of Mixpanel, a real-time Web analytics service that helps companies understand how users interact with Web applications.

The Death of the Pageview - ReadWriteStart

Editor’s note : Marc Benioff , chairman and CEO of salesforce.com , really loves Japan. And if you are a startup founder or tech executive, he thinks you should too. He explains why in this guest post, culled from observations from his most recent visit.